Two and a half days ago, at around 6:15am local time on December 28, AirAsia flight 8501 (QZ8501) disappeared en route from Indonesia to Singapore. There were 162 passengers and crew on-board, and no survivors have yet been found at the plane’s crash site in the Java Sea. Why, in 2014, can we still lose vehicles that are responsible shuttling millions of passengers across the skies every day? Why don’t we have real-time tracking of aircraft?

Over the last week, it has emerged that Verizon Wireless has been silently tracking around 100 million mobile customers using a supercookie that can’t be opted out of. The tracking cookie, as you can probably guess, allows Verizon to track almost everything that you do on the internet, and then sell that behavioral data to advertisers. Even worse, get this: Verizon’s implementation of the supercookie is so sloppy that any third party can also use the cookie to track your behavior.

The wily geniuses at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have created the world’s first real-time emotion detection app for Google Glass. The app (glassware, as Google prefers to call it) can also accurately detect someone’s age or gender. Real-time emotion detection could be of great use for people with disorders such as autism, who often struggle to interpret facial expressions, or simply for people who struggle to divine their partner’s true emotional state when they say that they’re “fine.’

In what is best described as a slow-motion bank robbery, it appears that a Kickstarter scam is about to walk away with over $500,000. The iFind, developed by WeTag, purports to be a battery-free Bluetooth tracking tag. WeTag says it has developed some magical, patent-pending technology that allows the iFind to harvest enough power from the air to operate the Bluetooth beacon forever, without a backup battery. Sadly, a bit like the Solar Roadways project, iFind sounds too good to be true, and 10,000 unfortunate backers are probably about to be conned out of $500,000.

Facebook’s facial recognition research project, DeepFace (yes really), is now very nearly as accurate as the human brain. DeepFace can look at two photos, and irrespective of lighting or angle, can say with 97.25% accuracy whether the photos contain the same face. Humans can perform the same task with 97.53% accuracy. The end goal of DeepFace we can only guess at, but it’s probably tracking your face across the entirety of the web, and in real life, as you move from shop to shop, producing some very lucrative behavioral tracking data indeed.

To combat a spate of deadly shark attacks in Western Australia, hundreds of cyborg sharks will now automatically send out a tweet if they come within a kilometer of a beach, to alert swimmers and surfers of the potential danger. The tweet includes the size and breed of the shark, along with its approximate location.

A research group at MIT has created a high-resolution, 3D motion tracking system that works through walls and other obstructions. From a static location connected to a computer, the system can track you as you walk around your house. Even when tracking you through walls or obstructions, it has enough resolution to detect gestures, such as lifting your arm. The system, called WiTrack, uses very simple hardware and software to perform the tracking — as a result, it is much cheaper, economically and computationally, than existing systems such as Kinect that use computer vision to track you.

Researchers from MIT have unveiled a new form of motion tracking that uses a three-point system to follow a person’s position, even through a totally opaque wall. Though the word “Kinect” has been thrown around quite liberally for the sake of accessibility, this is strictly a positional tracker — that means that it won’t be interpreting sign language or reading lips any time soon.

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